FULL CIRCLE

The last Doors album (if one excepts the tribute to Jim with "An American Prayer"). It is available as an import and is packaged together with "Other Voices" for a decent 18 ? budget at a well known Internet reseller (you know, the Brazilian one).

The jazzy and bluesy tone of "Other Voice", their previous album is also very present on this work.

The rocking and childish opener "Get Up And Dance"sounds like an ELO song (but not of the best ones). Very basic number. I do not like at all the country oriented style of "Four Billion Souls" acompletely useless track. "Verdillac" almost sound as a King Crimson song. The jazzy ambience and the improv style are really close to this other important band. If you would not know it is The Doors, you really can feel the KC mark on this number. One of the very few stand out tracks.

Most of the songs are tasteless and frankly not good. Where one could find some nice Doors touches in "Other Voice", there is almost not such moments here.

"Good Rocking" is a pure rock'n'roll number (hence its title). It is just better compared to the other tracks featured on this release. By no means it is an outstanding song. There are zillions of better songs out there. Nobody would even mention it was it not released by The Doors.

This album is no masterpiece as you can imagine. The poorest one along with "The Soft Parade". I am even hesitant to give it the two stars rating. On "The Soft Parade" there were at least some valuable numbers. But let's proceed...

It is not the Mexican joke "The Mosquito" that will change my mind. Stupid lyrics (an attempt to be funny probably) : "No me moleste mosquito, let me eat my burrito". You have to dare ! The second half of the song features a very good guitar solo as well as a good drumming work. At least, it saves it form being completely messy (it should have only featured this instrumental part actually).

"The Piano Bird" is my fave. It reminds me the mood of "Riders Of The Storm" exactly as "Ships With Sails" did on their previous album. Very nice to hear that they still can produce good Doors song. The groovy flavour is very nice. But one needs almost to wait the end of the album to get this. Very nice flute play as well (which is extremely rare in a Doors song). For this album (as for their previous one), some guests musicians were featured to give it a bit more weight to the core trio. Very few songs will benefit as much as this one of this addtional line-up.

"It Slipped My Mind" is dull for most of it but the guitar work from Krieger if great. So half the track is good while the other half just doesn't work.

The closing number is another classic Doors song although at times one seems to hear Tull's "Hare" part in "A Passion Play". Most of this long song (almost 6'30") is a solid rock tune. Here and there it deviates from its main direction and explores the grotesque and clownesque style (already featured in several of their old songs). All in all, one of the best here.

After this album, the trio will call it quit for some time. I am grateful to you Ray, Robert and John to have prolonged The Doors experience for a little while. It was simply not possible on the long run to do it without Jim I guess.

Thanks to the average numbers at the end of this album, I will rate it two stars, but I am doing an effort, really.